Alors, ils se mirent à parler du temps — De Roussan Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: November 16 → December 21, 2013

Often evoked as a pretext to fill a gap or begin a conversation, here when we talk about of the passing of time it is no longer present but will become. For this exhibition, the gallery has invited the 6 artists it represents for the first time to work on this reflection. A passage where the time stops or expands to reveal our history, our memory and our myths… A non-linear time and taunting to outwit our daily lives.

Two monumental altarpieces, Now, by Agnès Thurnauer welcome us and refer directly to the momentariness of the fleeting moment, the sky fixed on the canvas as a photographic cliché. Agnès Thurnauer considers the matter of time to be part of her painting, and the impossible subject of the sky to seize a metaphor of this suspended moment. Here only the artifice of painting and the spatiality of the representation permits the capture of the passing moment to display it as eternally present to the viewer.

Sandra Aubry and Sébastien Bourg freeze memory in an order tinged with auto-authoritarianism in a text inscribed on various mediums, such as beeswax, plaster, cement or paraffin: “I will not remember” (“ je ne me rappellerai pas”). Because of language the duo are obliged to forget (voluntary, desired or forced?), seeming to abandon or repeat words.

On the contrary, Swiss Petra Koehle and Nicolas Vermot Petit Outhenin seek to bring memory alive with a reproduction of a photograph dated from the 40s by Rosmarie Nohr, a German photographer who worked during the Second World War. The artists blend times and techniques to apprehend the past and create a differentiated understanding of our role in the present.

Also inspired by the return to origins and legends, Lily Hibberd creates a series of photoluminescent paintings. Living for three months in the Australian desert, Lily worked with a remote aboriginal community. From this experience she discovered a new myth of fire, the symbol of creation and destruction. Particulary its contemporary practical application in the renewal of the flora of the desert. Each painting becomes then the narrative thread of the story of a blaze, declining slowly but auto- regenerating with the production of light.

François Mazabraud confronts modern mythologies with his wallpaper of downloaded images, which reflect expectation and patience. For this exhibition, his printed design is used as the background for the other artists’ works, filling the waiting time of an internet search.

Finally, as a real alchemist, Stéfane Perraud mixes art, science and religious iconography with his piece “the rule of 3 ("la règle de 3”). Based on the figure of the Christ on the cross, he explores the origins of western history and transcribes a contemporary restoration of this, one of the most reproduced images in art history. The use of three kinds of gold (blue, pink and yellow), a tribute to Yves Klein’s trinity, offers an unchanging constancy and a timeless symbolism to these sculptures.

As if, after all, there was no end.